The present invention relates generally to wireless broadband communication systems, and more specifically to a system and method of increasing the data throughput of wireless broadband communication systems.
Wireless communication systems are known that are capable of providing broadband services in point-to-point and point-to-multipoint applications. Such wireless broadband communication systems may be deployed in remote geographical regions to provide users located in those regions with high speed Internet access. Such systems may also be employed by users wishing to set up communication links and networks accessible from locations within urban environments, and/or from locations dispersed across significant geographical distances.
A conventional wireless broadband communication system may be implemented as a line-of-sight (LOS) or non-line-of-sight (NLOS) system. For example, a LOS wireless communication system typically includes a directional antenna installed at one or more user locations within the line-of-sight of an antenna disposed at a base station. Further, a NLOS wireless communication system typically includes multiple transmit antennas disposed at a transmitter location and multiple receive antennas disposed at a receiver location. The transmitters within the NLOS system may transmit signals using known space-time coding and modulation techniques, while the receivers capture the transmitted signals and employ known signal processing techniques to decode and demodulate the transmitted signals, thereby recovering user data. The transmit and receive antennas of the NLOS system may be deployed in environments that include numerous scattering objects such as buildings, trees, hills, automobiles, etc. Within such an environment, the transmitted signals generally undergo multi-path propagation between the transmitters and the receivers while being scattered by the various objects within the environment. Such a multi-path environment allows multiple paths to be established between the transmitters and the receivers. By transmitting user data in parallel over these multiple paths, high data throughput and high spectral efficiencies can be achieved.
However, conventional wireless broadband communication systems like the LOS and NLOS systems described above have drawbacks. For example, such conventional wireless communication systems are typically configured to transmit and receive wireless signals using time division duplex (TDD) techniques. Although wireless broadband communication systems employing TDD techniques have been employed in long range point-to-point and point-to-multipoint applications, such systems have traditionally suffered from high latency, which is proportional to the transit time of the wireless signals from source to destination. High latency can significantly limit the data throughput of such systems in long range applications, especially when the number of point-to-point hops is large and/or the bandwidth requirement is high.
It would therefore be desirable to have a wireless broadband communication system that provides increased data throughput. Such a wireless broadband communication system would operate with high efficiency in long range point-to-point and point-to-multipoint applications while reducing the latency time in such applications.